On Mon, Sep 18, 2017 at 5:44 PM Stas Malyshev smalyshev@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi!
- Rather than "drifting away" from PHP, their top priority plans
include removing core language features like references and destructors.
Wow. I can see why they're doing it (those are sources of most complications ans security issues in the language, references being especially weird and tricky). But dropping those would certainly mean very heavy incompatibility with PHP, by which point it'd be completely separate language. Which probably excludes Max's #2 from consideration altogether.
Actually, I think a year is a pretty short time for ops to switch to PHP 7. I think we need to decide on this pretty much immediately.
Should it be on the TechCom agenda and should we have some public discussion on IRC in RFC format for this soon?
I see zero reason for us to go through all the formalities, unless we want to really. I have yet to see anyone (on list, or on IRC anywhere at all today) where anyone suggested (2) was a good idea at all. It's a horrifically bad idea. I don't consider it remotely viable and would do everything possible to veto such a move.
(1) is impossible as a long-term goal.
So this basically means we're going the route of (3) which is the only way we can actually expect people to use MediaWiki outside of Wikimedia. And considering we never really implemented any HHVM/Hack specific features (as far as I know) it means there's no reason we have to continue to support HHVM at all once WMF has moved off of it.
It's been a fun experiment for the past couple of years, but it's time to move on.
-Chad